Nomad Codes

gets us close to the heart of sacred Los Angeles, a city that dreamt (and sold) itself into existence through real estate hype, Hollywood, and the siren call of the perfect bod. The very architecture of Los Angeles suggests this material dreaming: in the teens and twenties, the town exploded with fantasy buildings like Babylonian ziggurats, pyramids, witchy cottages, castles, teepees, and restaurants shaped like derbies. This slapdash and often garish architectural raid on the collective unconscious looked ahead to Disneyland, fast-food signage, and the corporate “thematization” of contemporary urban space. The exotic imagination crudely stimulated by these buildings, which were often crudely built, also prepared the ground for the Orientalist moods and esoteric concepts that exerted enormous influence on LA’s spiritual scene. In other words, the construction of trashy fantasy in the built environment created the cultural and psychic space for exotic, imaginative, and otherworldly faiths and experiences to grow.
    Some fantasy architects were themselves active in California’s spiritual fringe. The most notable was Robert Stacy-Judd, one of countless Brits who long ago transformed Los Angeles into a sort of London-on-Pacific. As a young architect in England, Stacy-Judd designed various Orientalist structures, but in California he discovered his deep and abiding love: the Maya. He built the amazing Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, which remains his signature building; he also used Mayan stylings for private homes, a Baptist church in Ventura, and a Masonic hall in the San Fernando Valley. A kooky self-promoter, Stacy-Judd styled himself a Mayan explorer-archeologist; he also hobnobbed with Theosophists and the Philosophical Research Society’s Manly P. Hall. Stealing a few pages from febrile crypto-archeologists like Ignatius Donnelly and Lewis Spence, Stacy-Judd argued in his Atlantis: Mother of Empires that the Maya descended from the Atlanteans. Presumably, Stacy-Judd believed that by creating a regional architectural style rooted in Mayan culture, the West Coast would tap into that mighty spiritual source, though it’s tough to say whether the history of the Aztec Hotel—a brothel and speakeasy during prohibition—bears this out.
    In the first decades of the twentieth century, a restless hunger for exotic fantasy and escape helped make Los Angeles ground zero for California’s paradoxically popular esoteric scene—what I call its pop occulture. “No other city in the United States possesses so large a number of metaphysical charlatans in proportion to its population,” wrote local Willard Huntington Smith in 1913.“ Whole buildings are devoted to occult and outlandish orders—Mazdaznan clubs, yogi sects, homes of truth, cults of cosmic fluidists, astral planers, Emmanuel movers, Rosicrucians and other boozy transcendentalists.” These groups drew from the creative imagination and a common pool of psycho-spiritual motifs in order to sculpt a range of sects, fads, and mental-health regimens. Futuristic pseudo-sciences fused with the ancient lore introduced by Theosophists, astrologers, and encyclopedists like the aforementioned Hall, author of the classic omnibus folio The Secret Teachings of All Ages and collector of one of the world’s greatest library of hermetic and alchemical texts (the best of which were eventually pawned off to the Getty Museum). Even Protestant fundamentalism was transformed into Hollywood spectacle by the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who wore costumes, played jazz music, and hired Hollywood special effects guys for her “illustrated sermons.”
    Given all this activity, Los Angeles grew into a kind of theme park of the soul, a carnival of transcendence offering esoteric sources of entertainment, transport, and commodified wonder. Understandably, many of us react to this spectacle with mockery or befuddlement, sometimes leavened with pity for the poor dupes who get taken in. The metaphor of Oz lies heavy over California (L. Frank Baum wrote nearly all of the Oz books while living in the state), and its pop occulture is dense with humbug and hucksters in wizard capes. But cynicism about this scene is the easy road. Such mockery usually comes from secular people—in other words, from people who believe that religion is just a cultural invention. But if this is the case, why not appreciate and enjoy the creativity? By recognizing religion as at least partly a cultural